Trump-Schumer-Pelosi: A New Order in Washington?

Good morning. Here’s Joshua Jamerson’s morning take, and a summary of the top news this morning. Contact Josh at Joshua.Jamerson@wsj.com and follow him @joshjame. Click hereto get the Capital Journal Daybreak newsletter delivered to your inbox.

Trump-Schumer-Pelosi: A New Order in Washington? There seems to be a rare air of bipartisanship in Washington. The Senate voted 80-17 to approve $15.25 billion in initial relief and recovery efforts for both the Harvey and Irma hurricanes in a bill that also would suspend the nation’s debt ceiling and continue to fund the government. This is the deal President Donald Trump struck with Democrats Wednesday that left many in his own party stunned — and some irked.

The deal has further exposed the fault lines between Mr. Trump and the Congressional leaders of his party. Democrats say the president also expressed interest in another idea they’ve been pushing, which is toeliminate the legally imposed debt ceiling altogether. Meanwhile, several Republican figures like House Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) suggested that we’re witnessing temporary bipartisanship, simply a vehicle for Mr. Trump to get those affected by Harvey and Irma what they need without delay. Mr. Ryan’s viewpoint comes as he finds himself in an uncomfortable position: he will work to pass a bill he had argued againstboth in public and in the Oval Office, write Kristina Peterson and Siobhan Hughes.

Whether the deal is the start of lots of bipartisanship to come or just storm-related isn’t clear yet. But either way, the Senate acted swiftly to pass the bill yesterday, moving aid for the hurricanes one step closer to passage.

The aid expected to come to states including Texas and Florida will help with the overall response underway by the Federal Emergency Management agency, which was reformed in 2006 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. But the one-two punch of successive hurricanes will test the reforms, which federal officials say give FEMA a clearer mandate to respond, Ted Mann and I report.

If the aid/debt/funding bill makes it through the House — where a vote today will likely show how far Republicans are willing to go along with Mr. Trump’s strategy — and onto the president’s desk, the GOP tax reform efforts and a debate in Congress about immigration reform stand to return Washington to its more familiar state of partisanship. But it also could highlight the vast intraparty divisions of the GOP. Mr. Ryan yesterday declared Mr. Trump’s goal of lowering the corporate tax rate to 15% as possibly unachievable, WSJ’s tax policy reporter Richard Rubin reports. “The numbers are hard to make that work,” Mr. Ryan said.

President Trump defied the Republican Party this week by striking a deal with Democrats in Congress on raising the debt ceiling, keeping the government running and funding hurricane relief. The WSJ’s Gerald F. Seib explainswhether this signals Mr. Trump will be more independent in the coming weeks.

From the Washington bureau:

“North Korea is behaving badly and it’s got to stop,” Mr. Trump said at a White House news conference where he did not rule out military action against the regime. He also stopped short of answering a reporter’s question about whether he’d tolerate a nuclear North Korea, but a senior administration official later advised “not to read too much into” Mr. Trump’s refusal to say whether he would tolerate North Korea with nuclear weapons, Eli Stokols and Felicia Schwartz report. Plus: U.N. member countries are helping North Koreaevade international sanctions meant to halt its nuclear-weapons program, a U.N. report alleges, including through prohibited trade in arms and commodities and financing. And: Mexico declared North Korea’s ambassadorpersona non grata and gave him 72 hours to leave the country.

Mr. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., told congressional investigators he agreed to meet a Russian lawyer last summer who he was told had damaging information about Hillary Clinton because he believed the meeting could shed light on the “fitness, character or qualifications of a presidential candidate.”

In his first public comments since taking the reins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation early last month, Director Chris Wray said he had confidence in Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his office to “do the job” of investigating any Russian involvement in the 2016 election. He also said he had not detected “any whiff of interference” by White House officials, or any other individuals, in the federal investigation into Russia’s meddling.

A federal appeals court said the U.S. government had “cherry-picked” sections of immigration law to exclude aliens who should be able to enter the U.S., ruling that 24,000 vetted refugees may enter the country while the Supreme Court weighs the policy’s legality. The administration suggested it quickly would ask the Supreme Court to reinstate the refugee ban while the case is pending, Jess Bravin reports. Plus: In another high-profile case, the Trump administration told the Supreme Court that the First Amendment entitles a Colorado baker to turn away gay couples seeking wedding cakes.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said she plans to roll back Obama-era guidance that colleges and universities use a lower standard of evidence in determining guilt than many criminal cases require. “The current approach isn’t working,” she said in a speech at George Mason University. She said that students and campus administrators “have all told me that the current approach does a disservice to everyone involved,” including survivors of sexual assault.

The contours of a deal to fund insurer paymentscritical to the Affordable Care Act took shape Thursday, even as conservative lawmakers and the White House pushed an alternative plan to repeal parts of the law, reports Michelle Hackman.

Steve Bannon said the Catholic church’s opposition to Mr. Trump’s decision this week to rescind protections for some young undocumented immigrants stemmed from an economic need. “They need illegal aliens to fill the churches, it’s obvious on the face of it,” Mr. Bannon told Charlie Rose of CBS News. “They have an economic interest in unlimited immigration.

Everything from jobless claims, which already surged in a report on Thursday, to gross domestic product and inflation will be knocked off course by Hurricane Harvey. Forecasters in The Wall Street Journal’s survey of economists expect the storm to reduce the pace of job gains by about 27,000 jobs a month in the third quarter on average, write Josh Zumbrun and Sarah Chaney.

From across the WSJ:

A hack of credit-reporting agency Equifax Inc. could prove uniquely damaging, given the gateway role such companies play in helping to determine which consumers gain access to financing and how much of it is made available. Roughly 143 million U.S. consumers are potentially affected by the breach.

Authorities ordered more than 650,000 people to evacuatethe Miami area as Hurricane Irma churned toward a possible collision with the mainland U.S. and killed at least 11 people in the Caribbean, though it was downgraded to a Category 4 storm. The current forecast track calls for the storm to approach south Florida on Saturday, with Miami squarely in its potential track.

Israel launched airstrikes on a Syrian military compound and hit a facility targeted by U.S. sanctions this year for involvement in chemical-weapons production. The attack came a day after a U.N. report blamed the Syrian regime for an April 4 sarin gas attack that killed at least 83 civilians and called it a war crime.

Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezoshas never been one to shy away from logistical challenges. But his company’s decision to open a second headquarters somewhere in North America could create a host of new strategic and managerial issues for the company, experts say.

The Food and Drug Administration is modernizing the way it evaluates new drug applications derived from the fast-growing fields of gene and cell therapy, commissioner Scott Gottlieb said.

Americans are losing faith in the value of a college degree, with majorities of young adults, men and rural residents saying college isn’t worth the cost, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey shows.

HERE’S A LOOK AT THE DAY AHEAD

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION: President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence receive a hurricane update at the White House at 12:15 p.m. The president and first lady and vice president and second lady travel to Camp David at 2:30 p.m.

CONGRESS: The House meets at 9 a.m., and is expected to vote on the bill passed Thursday in the Senate that combined $15.25 billion in relief for Hurricanes Harvey and Irma with a three-month extension of the government’s funding and its borrowing limit.

ECONOMIC INDICATORS: The Commerce Department releases wholesale trade inventories for July at 10 a.m. The Federal Reserve releases consumer credit data for July at 3 p.m.

WHAT WE’RE READING AROUND THE WEB

The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos filesa lengthy report about a visit to Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, and the view there of President Kim Jong Un: “Six years into Kim Jong Un’s reign, some analysts in Seoul argue that senior Party officials can overrule or direct him, but U.S. intelligence believes that Kim is in sole command.”

Matt Sedensky and Bernard Condon of the Associated Press look at the life of Donald Trump Jr., who met with congressional investigators Thursday: “His testimony gave glimpses of a man who has both relished the name he was born into and distanced himself from it, who has sought a life different from his father and carbon-copied his braggadocio, who has built dueling personas of a brass-knuckled, slick-haired, win-at-all costs New York millionaire and unassuming, down-to-earth American everyman.”

“Saudi Arabia may be the latest country to give up on regime change in Syria and fall in line with Russia’s successful campaign to shore up President Bashar al-Assad,” write Henry Meyer and Glen Carey of Bloomberg News.